Youth Voices

Meet Hannah Schöffmann, Our Representative

My name is Hannah Schöffmann, I am currently seventeen years old and I am from Austria. I love learning new languages, reading, going out with my friends and listening to music. Another passion of mine is travelling and meeting people from other countries. I am an open- minded person, getting to know people from other cultures; with different lifestyles and values, different beliefs and different views of the world is for me an outstanding experience. I would love to learn more about life in Pakistan, which I think is very different from my life here in Austria. In return I would love to tell you a little bit about how it is to be young in Austria.

About one month ago, I had the honor to visit the World Summit Youth Award Festival 2011, which took place in my home town Graz, as a youth journalist for my internet platform. During this festival, I met many inspiring, innovative and highly motivated young people from all over the world. These people have done great things to improve our world, and I feel very lucky, that I had the opportunity to get to know all those amazing persons. I am especially happy that I met Momal Mushtaq and Seemal Mushtaq, with whom I had a great time, inspiring talks and who became my friends, even though we only spent a few days together. They invited me to present our project, (It is sadly far too small to be a winner at the WSYA), on their internet platform.

Our project, is called “Kenne deine Rechte”, in English “Know your rights”. The main idea of our internet platform is that young people write for other young people about the Human Rights, covering Austrian as well as international topics. We are a team of motivated young people, and with the help of a few coordinators from the European Training Center for Human Rights in Graz, we publish three articles every two weeks. In addition, our readers have the possibility to ask us questions concerning their personal rights, which we then try to answer. Our website is still rather at the beginning, but we want to make some expansions and improvements in the course of the next years.
I am really looking forward to this exchange with you, and I hope that it will be a great experience on both sides!